During my last visit, my cooperating teacher told me that (while she does not teach directly from the textbook) she follows chapters from the book while planning and teaching. When I explained to her that I had to do a unit plan for class, she gave me a annotated copy (Teacher's Edition) of the class textbook. She told me that Chapter 7: Chemical Quantities, would be the focus of class when students return from Winter Break. She also told me that she does not find unit plans very useful for teaching chemistry.
This chapter has three sections. They are: "The Mole: A Measurement of Matter," "Mole-mass and Mole-volume Relationships," and "Percent Composition and Chemical Formulas." I would like to begin the unit with a theoretical explanation of the concept of the mole, Avagadro's number, and relevant conversions. This explanation could be reinforced with later use of demonstration and physical modeling. My high school chemistry teacher had blocks of different sizes that he used to show the differences in mass among one mole of different substances. For the second section of the chapter, I would introduce the conversion factors that relate the mole to volume of gas, mass, and representative particles. This is again a theoretical discussion based in dimensional analysis. Animations and videos are good for presenting these specific relationships. For the third section of the chapter, students could use modeling kits to understand chemical formulas after a brief explanation of percent composition. The applicability of an empirical formula to multiple real world compounds would be an interesting point in the discussion of formulas and composition. This point could be used as the basis of a lab experiment.
This material is fairly difficult to come up with engaging unit plan ideas for. More time to think and research will hopefully give rise to better ideas that will keep students engaged.
During my last visit, my cooperating teacher told me that (while she does not teach directly from the textbook) she follows chapters from the book while planning and teaching. When I explained to her that I had to do a unit plan for class, she gave me a annotated copy (Teacher's Edition) of the class textbook. She told me that Chapter 7: Chemical Quantities, would be the focus of class when students return from Winter Break. She also told me that she does not find unit plans very useful for teaching chemistry.
This chapter has three sections. They are: "The Mole: A Measurement of Matter," "Mole-mass and Mole-volume Relationships," and "Percent Composition and Chemical Formulas." I would like to begin the unit with a theoretical explanation of the concept of the mole, Avagadro's number, and relevant conversions. This explanation could be reinforced with later use of demonstration and physical modeling. My high school chemistry teacher had blocks of different sizes that he used to show the differences in mass among one mole of different substances. For the second section of the chapter, I would introduce the conversion factors that relate the mole to volume of gas, mass, and representative particles. This is again a theoretical discussion based in dimensional analysis. Animations and videos are good for presenting these specific relationships. For the third section of the chapter, students could use modeling kits to understand chemical formulas after a brief explanation of percent composition. The applicability of an empirical formula to multiple real world compounds would be an interesting point in the discussion of formulas and composition. This point could be used as the basis of a lab experiment.
This material is fairly difficult to come up with engaging unit plan ideas for. More time to think and research will hopefully give rise to better ideas that will keep students engaged.